The Hunt for MH370

by Ean Higgins

  By the time Zaharie finished the steeply banked turns – more than two minutes – the period of useful consciousness would have expired for anyone who did not have an oxygen mask on. Within three or four minutes at most they would have passed out. While their hearts would likely have stayed beating for a while, after several minutes of unconsciousness they would have started to suffer brain damage. Some passengers would have become brain dead, others would have died.

  For those who somehow did manage to find the drop-down masks in the darkness and sharp bank angle and got them on during the short period of useful consciousness, it would only be a temporary reprieve. The oxygen from the drop-down masks is designed purely to keep passengers alive long enough for the pilots to put the aircraft into a rapid descent to lower altitudes where there is enough oxygen for them to breathe, usually about 10,000 feet if the terrain allows it.

  On the Boeing 777, the oxygen in the drop-down masks for the passengers does not come from oxygen bottles, the way it does for the pilots, but is chemically generated. How long it lasts depends on altitude. In a normal scenario of a rapid descent, the passenger oxygen would last 22 minutes, but if the aircraft stayed at 35,000 feet it would only last about 12 minutes.

  That makes the timing of Zaharie’s murderous plan ruthlessly effective. The elapsed time from the moment the aircraft made the turn at waypoint IGARI at 1:21am, until it appeared back over the east coast of the Malay Peninsula at 1:37am, was 16 minutes. The oxygen from the drop-down masks would have expired about four minutes earlier, and any passengers or crew who had them on would have lost useful consciousness or passed out altogether in those four minutes.

  That would explain why there were no text messages or cell phone calls of alarm, distress or final words from any of the passengers or crew once the aircraft passed near or over built-up areas like Kota Bharu or Penang: they were all unconscious or dead. It has been established that had anyone been conscious when MH370 passed near Penang, they may have been able to make a mobile phone call. At 1:52am, first officer Fariq’s phone made contact with the Penang mobile service; Malaysian authorities say it was just an automatic log-on, not an attempt to make a call or send a text message.

  To be even more sure, Zaharie flew higher after the initial turn – the oxygen would have run out even faster and the hypoxia would have been more severe at 40,000 feet. The Malaysian safety investigation report quotes a publication Basic Flight Pathology as saying useful consciousness is between 30 seconds and one minute at 35,000 feet, but only 15 to 20 seconds at 40,000 feet.

  Zaharie waited half an hour in all after depressurising the aircraft, to be sure the 238 passengers and crew in his charge were neutralised and he was flying an airliner of the unconscious, brain-dead and dead. Then he again reached up and pushed the pressurisation button to ‘on’, and within a few minutes the cabin was back to near ground level air pressure, and warm. In a leisurely fashion Zaharie took off his jacket, gloves, scarf and cap and comfortably settled back to proceed with the rest of his elaborate murder-suicide plan.

  The aircraft tracked along the airspace border between Malaysia and Thailand – a deliberate ploy by Zaharie to further confuse authorities; Thai and Malaysian controllers might have thought the aircraft was the other’s responsibility. This was indeed the case, it later emerged: Thai primary radar detected the aircraft, but Thai controllers did not alert Malaysian controllers because, Thai officials said, the Malaysians did not ask about it.

  Malaysian military radar then tracked MH370 to Penang, a bustling island city on peninsular Malaysia’s west coast. At 1:52am, the Malaysian safety investigation report says, the radar ‘blip’ was ‘observed to be at 10 nautical miles south of Penang Island on a heading of 261 degrees.’ It gave Zaharie a good look at the lights of the city where he was born and grew up – for him the slow, curving turn he made around it marked final salute to his happy boyhood memories.

  After Penang, the playback of primary radar shows MH370 headed up the Straits of Malacca on Airway Route N571. Zaharie selected that segment of regular, normal commercial airliner flight because had the Malaysian or Thai military been actively watching MH370 on primary radar on that phase of the flight, it would have appeared unremarkable: an aircraft proceeding steadily in a north-westerly direction along a conventional air route, passing through waypoints, likely on its way to India or beyond.

  The primary radar tracked MH370 passing through the waypoint VAMPI, then MEKAR, beyond the northern tip of Sumatra. At 10 nautical miles beyond MEKAR, and before it got to the next waypoint, NILAM, MH370 disappeared from primary radar; it had simply gone beyond the usual 250 kilometres radar range, at 2:22am.

  Zaharie had planned this part of the flight as a ruse, knowing searchers would, in real time or on playback, consult the primary radar, and see MH370 flying on a straight north-westerly track and official airway until it dropped from radar coverage. Anyone trying to find the aircraft after it disappeared would therefore look on that track – and, at one point in the subsequent search and rescue mission, they did.

  But that’s not where MH370 actually went.

  After flying about 15 minutes farther along the north-west N571 route just to be absolutely sure he had been out of primary radar range for a while, Zaharie turned the aircraft left on a track going almost due south, to the middle of nowhere in the southern Indian Ocean – just like the imaginary flight he had practised on his home computer flight simulator. Zaharie punched into the Flight Management System, or autopilot, a true heading for it to steer of 188 degrees, which would take him far to the south.

  At that point, Zaharie thought he had achieved his complex plan of avoiding detection and interception, and could hide the aircraft and the 238 souls in his charge forever. But there was one thing he didn’t know – hardly any commercial airline pilots did at that time since it is not used for navigation. Automatic satellite ‘handshakes’ are sent, in the case of MH370 roughly hourly, from the aircraft to a ground station via a satellite so as to transmit, in this case, engine performance data to aircraft maintenance engineers. Through some clever deduction, scientists were later able to use the satellite handshakes to establish the general direction the flight took south, but not the final resting place of the aircraft.

  Over the next nearly six hours, Zaharie had little to do since the autopilot was taking the aircraft where he wanted it to. There was no-one on board to talk to – the passengers and crew he was responsible for were piled like rag dolls over one another in their seats in the cabin or lying sprawled out in the aisles. There was no mobile phone coverage, and he made no radio transmissions.

  But Zaharie wanted to have a look at his deadly handiwork. One of the mysteries of the flight is that the automatic satellite signals stopped for a period, then started broadcasting again at 2:25am with a ‘log-on request’.

  As mentioned, Zaharie at the start of the hijack disabled the circuit which powered the cabin lights. But without realising it, he also switched off the automatic satellite communication system known as the satellite data unit or ‘SATCOM’. To have a look back in the passenger cabin, he repowered the same circuit, turning the lights back on but also, again unwittingly, reconnected the satellite data unit.

  There is a hint in the ATSB reports that this is what happened. It says the SATCOM went down somewhere between the last ACARS message at 1:07am, and an unsuccessful automatic attempt by the satellite ground station to re-establish contact with the aircraft occurred, about an hour later, at 2:03am. An interruption of the SATCOM, the ATSB said, could be due to engines flaming out, or ‘intermittent technical failures’. But it could also be the result of pilot intervention, by changing the electrical routing system using switches located in the overhead panel in the cockpit, or via the circuit breakers in the electronic equipment bay being pulled and later reset.

  The ATSB concludes the reason the satellite data unit went off in this phase of the flight and then c
ame back on with a log-on request at 2:25am was likely due to a power interruption.

  ‘As this power interruption was not due to engine flame-outs, it is possible that it was due to manual switching of the electrical system,’ the ATSB said.

  Of course, once Zaharie made the final turn and set the autopilot for the long track south, he knew he could have ended his involvement right there and then. He could have just again reached up and pressed the button turning off the pressurisation; he would know death by hypoxia is a fairly painless, even pleasant way to go in a manner of minutes.

  But Zaharie had a very calculated, pre-planned and complex strategy from start to finish to make sure the aircraft would never be found. He wanted to finish the job: fly the aircraft to the end and ditch it in a controlled fashion to see it break up into only a few pieces and sink, rather than create a big debris field by crashing the plane in an uncontrolled dive and hitting the water at high speed. A debris field from an unpiloted crash would have been visible to searching aircraft, or on satellite photo playback.

  Zaharie also wanted to run the aircraft out of fuel or very close to it, to avoid an oil slick which, like a debris field, could also give away its final resting place to search aircraft or satellites. Gliding an aircraft to a controlled ditching is entirely doable, especially if the question of whether the pilots, cabin crew and passengers survive is not a concern.

  At a bit after 8:00am, having travelled for around seven-and-a-half hours since take-off, MH370 was close to running out of fuel. At that stage, having started in the northern hemisphere, Zaharie had taken the plane to about 38 degrees south, about the latitude of Bass Strait. Zaharie had set the fuel in ‘cross feed’ mode, in which fuel could flow from the fuller tank to the less full one, so the time taken for the second engine to flame out after the first died from fuel exhaustion was not long.

  By that stage, at 40,000 feet, having flown all night, the sun was coming up in the east – not at ground level yet, but at the altitude MH370 was cruising. After both engines flamed out, Zaharie wanted to get the aircraft considerably lower for a variety of reasons.

  Firstly, and very practically, with no engine power he would have to get the nose down quickly to maintain a safe airspeed and avoid an aerodynamic stall where he would fall out of the sky. Secondly, although he would again have donned his oxygen mask, without engine power the aircraft would again rapidly decompress, making the cockpit uncomfortably cold and foggy. Thirdly, while any ships below him would still be in darkness, at dawn MH370 would shine out brightly at 40,000 feet; better to again get below the sun and back into the cover of night. Zaharie took manual control of the aircraft and put it into a steep accelerating dive of 20 degrees, equal to an initial descent of 17,500 feet per minute, before converting the kinetic energy of the dive into a glide to take him about 90 nautical miles further before reaching the ocean surface.

  Two things happened automatically when MH370 ran out of fuel. The ram air turbine, a fan-like device, deployed from the fuselage into the slipstream, generating just enough hydraulic power and electricity to operate the control surfaces and power the main instruments, but not enough to lower the flaps. But then, a minute or so later, the auxiliary power unit automatically powered up.

  The auxiliary power unit is another, smaller jet engine, used not to propel the aircraft forward but to generate enough power to operate the aircraft’s primary systems. Pilots have the option of firing it up on the ground before flight to run the plane’s basic systems like air conditioning, without having to start the engines. On some aircraft, to start the main engines pilots have to first get the auxiliary power unit going. Importantly, with the auxiliary power unit running, the flaps can be lowered even when the engines have run out of fuel; it is designed to run for a period of some minutes after main engine fuel exhaustion. That enabled Zaharie to complete his plan.

  Zaharie ordered the extra fuel and planned the flight precisely so that when he was gliding towards the surface of the ocean, the sun was just coming up at sea level. By the time Zaharie was in the last few thousand feet of his descent, it was not long after dawn but clear daylight.

  The weather and sea conditions in that part of the southern Indian Ocean on the morning of 8 March 2014 are fairly well established from satellite reports. Zaharie turned the aircraft into the south-westerly wind. He saw the primary three- to four-metre swell radiating its usual direction northwards from the deep low-pressure weather systems far to the south. There is a well-established protocol professional pilots know when it comes to ditching an aircraft at sea, the aim being to give the aircraft the best chance of minimising damage and staying afloat long enough to get passengers off into life rafts. That involves trying to land the aircraft parallel with the direction of the swell, and on the back of a wave. Zaharie ditched at the top back side of the swell which was running at the time.

  A ditching in this direction, with the receding swell on the aircraft’s right, meant the right wing hit the swell first. Even with flaps lowered, which enables aircraft to land at lower speeds, the ditching speed was around 250 kilometres per hour, and first the right then the left engines were torn off as they dragged through the water. The right flaps and flaperons, having been fully lowered by Zaharie, progressively dragged along the surface of the water, eroding their trailing edges, before the pressure became too great and they too broke off altogether.

  The fuselage broke wide at the weakest part – the forward wing junction – and separated. The aircraft sank with the fuselage in two main chunks. Zaharie was knocked out on impact, nearly dead, and quickly drowned, as he had expected.

  And with that, at around 8:30am on 8 March 2014, Zaharie achieved exactly what he wanted to do when he first started modelling it on his home computer flight simulator: in an act of mass murder-suicide, he had made a jetliner, himself and the 238 innocent souls on board vanish without a trace in one of the world’s deepest, wildest and most remote stretches of sea.

  There have been many confirmed cases of pilot hijack/suicide on commercial airliners, and quite a few other suspected ones. The most infamous in recent years was the 2015 Germanwings Flight 9525, which left Barcelona on 24 March heading for Dusseldorf with 150 people on board. Co-pilot Andreas Lubitz waited until the captain left the cockpit for the toilet, then locked the door and flew the Airbus A320 into the French Alps, killing himself and everyone else.

  Spookily, in the 10 minutes from the time Lubitz set the flight management system for 100 feet, until the aircraft crashed, the cockpit voice recorder revealed he did not say a word and his breathing remained normal. This was all while air traffic controllers repeatedly tried to engage with him and the captain banged on the cockpit and shouted. During the very last moment of the cockpit voice recording, passengers can be heard screaming.

  The air crash investigation found the young Germanwings first officer had psychological issues that had not been picked up. He apparently feared he was losing his vision, but hid the fact from his employers. In such cases, there’s often a big difference between the public persona and the demons that lurk within. Friends and neighbours who knew Lubitz described him as ‘quiet’ but ‘fun’, and said he loved flying – just like Zaharie loved flying.

  Another prominent case was SilkAir Flight 185. The Boeing 737 took off from Jakarta bound for Singapore, and crashed almost vertically down into the Musi River in southern Sumatra on 19 December 1997, killing all 97 passengers and seven crew on board. In that case, attention focused on the captain, Tsu Way Ming. He had dropped more than $US1.2 million in losses in high-risk securities trading, and taken out a $US600,000 life insurance policy that took effect the day of the crash. His possible stressors were many. Six months earlier Tsu had faced disciplinary action by SilkAir, an airline majority-owned by the Singapore government, for turning off a cockpit voice recorder.

  The 19th of December was also the anniversary of a tragedy still haunting Tsu. On that day in
1979, four of his Singapore Air Force colleagues had crashed into a mountain. The ace flyer Tsu had been due to lead the training exercise but pulled out when his Skyhawk developed a fault – the suggestion is that he blamed himself for not being with his colleagues.

  The Indonesian government investigation found there was not enough evidence to determine the cause of the crash, but the US National Transportation Safety Board said it was most likely murder-suicide, committed by Tsu.

  A similar disagreement between two investigating bodies occurred in EgyptAir Flight 990, flying from Los Angeles to Cairo via New York, on 31 October 1999. It crashed into the ocean off Nantucket Island. The black boxes were recovered, and they record first officer Gameel Al-Batouti repeatedly saying, ‘I rely on God,’ in Arabic as he pushed the control column forward and shut off the engines, while the captain repeatedly asked, ‘What’s happening?’ The NTSB concluded Batouti deliberately crashed the plane for motives unknown, while the Egyptian investigation settled on elevator failure, something the NTSB said was not consistent with the facts.

  This leads on to the big question which has to be asked in the case of MH370: is there anything in Zaharie’s background to explain why he would have taken himself and 238 souls in his charge to a watery grave deep in the southern Indian Ocean?

  The dominant, though certainly not unanimous, opinion in the international professional aviation community is that the disappearance of MH370 was most probably a case of pilot hijack by Zaharie.

  The general view is that most other scenarios, such as terrorist hijack gone wrong, rapid decompression, and onboard fire, require an extraordinarily large number of individual and unlikely occurrences to happen in a certain sequence. Although the promoters of those theories all posit an explanation for why there was no distress call, that element is problematic in the eyes of many professional pilots and air crash investigators. By contrast, the ‘pilot hijack’ theory basically requires just one thing – for Zaharie to want to do it – and all the other known facts, including the lack of a distress call, fit neatly into place.